What Is Novig

Novig is a sports prediction market. You buy and sell event contracts on outcomes such as a team win or a player stat. Prices run from $0 to $1 and are the market's probability. A winning contract settles at $1. A losing contract settles at $0. You can sell before settlement.

Novig's help center describes this as a CFTC-regulated exchange under federal commodities law, not a state-licensed sportsbook and not a sweepstakes product. That is a recent change. The company previously operated a sweepstakes product, and before that held a Colorado sports-betting license, according to contemporaneous reporting. The CFTC product is the one this page describes.

This is the Novig overview. The shared ideas are in what prediction markets are, how prices work, and how markets resolve. For a broader platform comparison, start with Kalshi vs Polymarket. The research checklist is How to Research a Prediction Market Before You Trade.

Approval and launch

On June 16, 2026, CNBC reported that the CFTC had approved Novig's application to operate a designated contract market. InGame, the same day, reported the DCM's name as Ludlow Exchange, and that the application had been in the CFTC portal for about five months. ProphetX had been approved the week before. CNBC described Novig's pitch as sports-first, with founders Jacob Fortinsky and Kelechi Ukah, and said the company would move the business onto the regulated exchange and keep a 21+ age limit.

The public launch of those contracts came later. Deadspin reported on August 5, 2026 that the regulated sports contracts were available in 47 states, with Arizona, Michigan, and Nevada geofenced, and that existing sweepstakes accounts needed an app update and a geolocation check.

Federal registration did not end state friction. Novig's own help center, current as of this writing, still says trading is unavailable in those three states.

Where it is available

Novig's eligibility article says:

• Trading is legal in the sense that the contracts are CFTC-regulated derivatives, not state sportsbook bets.
• The product is available nationwide except Nevada, Arizona, and Michigan.
• What matters is the physical location of the device when you trade. A resident of an open state who is standing in Nevada cannot trade. A resident of Nevada who is physically in an open state can.
• The app checks location when you open it to trade. Location permissions have to be on.

The help center does not, in the article reviewed here, discuss a partial block in Washington. Early launch coverage mentioned unverified reports of one. Do not treat a rumor as a rule. If the app rejects a location, the app is the rule.

Age: CNBC and the August launch coverage both say 21+. Kalshi's help center, by contrast, says 18+. Do not copy one platform's age rule onto the other.

Identity checks apply. The eligibility article says Novig verifies identity under CFTC customer-identification rules.

What the contracts are

Novig's "What is Novig?" article limits the product to sports. Examples it gives are team wins and player stats. It is not a general politics or macro exchange. That is the main product difference versus Kalshi and Polymarket, which list those categories alongside sports.

A contract price is the probability. There is no vig inside the price. Novig says so on the fee page: you trade with other users, and the fee, when there is one, is added on top for the taker.

You can:

• buy, expecting the price to rise
• sell before the event, to lock a gain or a smaller loss
• hold to settlement

Settlement grades come from Novig's API docs. A market can grade as a single winner, a push that returns collateral, or a fair-market-value price on each outcome. A grade can be remediated: the market is graded again. Pushes and fair-value prices are voids, not wins. Only a win pays full value.

When an event goes live, Novig voids resting orders. A pre-game order does not silently become a live order.

Fees

Every Novig trading fee uses one formula:

fee = coefficient × price × (1 − price) × contracts

The coefficient depends on the trade. From the help center fee page:

Novig's worked example: taking 100 live NFL contracts at 50¢ costs 0.03 × 0.50 × 0.50 × 100 = $0.75. The contracts still pay $100 if they win. The fee is added to the cost, not subtracted from the $1 payout.

Futures are not universally charged. The help page says that as of September 10, 2026, golf and tennis futures do not carry the futures fee. Other leagues' futures do. The API docs also say PGA, ATP, WTA, and UFC futures charge nothing because they use a schedule that never goes live. If those two sources ever disagree, the market object's own fee field wins. The API docs say to read fee from the market rather than infer it.

Makers pay $0 on every row in the current schedule. There is no fee to place, edit, or cancel an order that does not trade. Order-book prices are shown before the fee. The ticket shows the fee before you confirm. Parlay quotes are all-in.

How to read a Novig price

A pre-game Novig price is one of the cleaner probabilities in this category, because the taker fee on a straight pre-game trade is currently zero and the help center says the price has no vig inside it. You still have the spread. If the best bid is 44¢ and the best ask is 48¢, the probability is about 46%, and you pay 48¢ to buy.

Live prices are a different trade. The fee appears, resting orders get pulled at the moment the event goes live, and the book can gap. A stale pre-game price is not a live price.

Novig will not help you research a Fed meeting, because it does not list one. For sports markets, the same research rules apply: know whether overtime counts, what a push returns, and whether you are looking at a pre-game book or a live one. For a Kalshi, Polymarket or Coinbase sports market, BetScan gathers that context for the link you paste.

Sources

• Product: What is Novig?
• Eligibility and the Arizona, Michigan, and Nevada block: Eligibility and legality
• Fees: Fees on Novig
• Grades and live-order voids: Event lifecycle
• Fee schedules in the API: Trading fees
• CFTC approval, June 16, 2026: CNBC and InGame
• August 5, 2026 launch report: Deadspin